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By Hyunjoo Jin and Joshua Franklin
SAN FRANCISCO, February 23 (Reuters) – Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson told Reuters on Tuesday that the luxury electric car maker plans to launch a rival to TeslaInc’s Model 3 in 2024 or 2025.
The company led by the former Tesla engineer is following the same strategy as Tesla, starting with a luxury car to create a halo around the brand and then expanding to the mass market.
This week, it announced plans to go public by merging with a blank check company, a move that indicated a market capitalization of $ 56 billion – before regular production of the first Lucid Motors model began.
Increasing mass production of a car is a major financial challenge, said Rawlinson.
“I can’t wait to do that,” he told Reuters, referring to Tesla’s Model 3 rival, the cheapest sedan. But first, Rawlinson said that for now he would focus on the larger, luxury car, which paradoxically requires less resources.
“Making a smaller car requires more capital, because you need a bigger factory and more automation,” he said.
Experts say it may be too late for Lucid to launch the affordable model, as legacy manufacturers like Volkswagen, Hyundai Motor and Ford are already launching affordable models to challenge Tesla.
“There is a question about whether there will be a market for Lucid after four to five years,” said Mel Yu, an analyst in the anautomotive industry.
Lucid Motors’ first electric car, the luxurious Air, will not go into production now until the end of 2021, after the initially planned spring 2021 launch.
Rawlinson said the automaker expects to produce a less expensive and less than $ 70,000 version of the luxury sedan in 2022, followed by a sport utility vehicle codenamed Gravityin Project 2023. He said he is interested in developing pickups and commercial vehicles , but they are several years from now and can be built with partners.
“The world is in urgent need of $ 25,000 in cars. Lucid cannot realistically do this for another eight years,” he said, adding that even Tesla has not yet launched this model.
He also said that six well-known automakers contacted him last month and expressed interest in Lucid Motors technology. Cooperation with another company could lead to the manufacture of a $ 25,000 car in the next three to four years, he added.
He also said it is too early for the company to make its own battery cells for now, adding that it has contracts with suppliers LG Chem and Samsung SDI. (Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin and Peter Henderson in San Francisco and Joshua Franklin in Miami; edited by Aurora Ellis and Richard Pullin)